Binu Sivan

“The wife he had first chosen had dressed drably: from silence and inflexious--more than from words--he learned that now. Her grey hair straggled to her shoulders, her back was a little humped. He poked his way about, and they were two old people when they went out on their rounds, older than they were in their ageless happiness. She wouldn't have hurt a fly, she wasn't a person you could be jealous of, yet of course it was hard on a new wife to be haunted by happiness, to be challenged by the simplicities there had been. He had given himself to two women; he hadn't withdrawn from the first, he didn't from the second.
Each house that contained a piano brought forth its contradictions. The pearls old Mrs. Putrill wore were opals, the pallid skin of the stationer in Kiliath was freckled, the two lines of oaks above Oghill were surely beeches? 'Of course, of course,' Owen Dromgould agreed, since it was fair that he should do so. Belle could not be blamed for making her claim, and claims could not be made without damage or destruction. Belle would win in the end because the living always do. And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning, and had had the better years."

--"The Piano Tuner's Wives”
― William Trevor, Selected Stories

“It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.”
― William Trevor

“She is embarrassed to be alive and no one on earth can fully console her.”
― William Trevor, The Boarding-House

“The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills.”
― William Trevor